Once Upon a Wardrobe(48)

He stopped and went no further.

Not yet.

Those days during the war, as various children came and went over three years, Jack tutored his students and met with the Inklings. He lectured and he walked and he wrote letters. There were air raids and bad news from the front; there were missives from Warnie telling of his safety and bringing news of the horrors. There were rations of eggs and butter and tea. Minto and Maureen helped with the children, and they in turn helped in the house. There were interesting dinners at the long table in the front dining room, where they talked about the books they read, or the games they played, or their parents in London or gone.

When the war was finally and blessedly over, the children returned to London, a city that had been gutted but not destroyed. On a cold night with a house empty of the footsteps and laughter of children, Jack looked to Warnie over a long pipe draw and said, “I don’t think I ever appreciated children until the war brought them to us.”

Even as he said this, the story Jack had started about four young children arriving at a professor’s house in the countryside sat quietly in a drawer.





Nineteen

The True Myth




Megs lifts her head and closes the notebook while George feels doubt in his sister’s tales for the first time. It’s a bad feeling and he wants to dismiss it, but she must have made that story up, the part where Mr. Lewis used different names, the wrong names altogether. Maybe she’s been making all of this up and she never even spoke to the author.

“Those are the wrong names,” he tells her firmly. “Except for Peter, those aren’t the children in Narnia.”

“They are the right names for his first go-round.” She tries to keep her smile from rising, but she can’t and she laughs. She knows he would have noticed and doubted her; she toyed with him.

George shakes his head at her and then thinks about all of it: about first and second go-rounds. About how the genesis of a story isn’t necessarily clear or straightforward. A story can change with time, just as people do. “So,” he finally says, “Mr. Lewis worked on the story of the children, then put it away and changed it later.”

“Yes, he picked it up nine years after he started. He says he went back to it in the summer of 1948, but that’s a different story.” Her voice is fading, like the color is leaving the sound.

She is tired, he can tell, but this is too important to let go.

“That’s only two years ago,” George says.

Megs nods. “Yes. I guess, just as most stories, it changed.”

“Okay, so what’s next?”

“George, there’s only one more story. Don’t you want me to save it?”

“No!”

“Well, he told me about a night he had at the edge of the river with two friends. A night that changed his life. We have to go back about ten years or so, but then we catch up to the day he sat down to really write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

She rustles the pages of her notebook and flips to the end. The bound pages are almost full of her handwriting, not many blank pages left.

“This one is a story about how friendships change the course of our lives.” She stops as if she’s thinking of someone, then clears her throat and continues to read. “So Mr. Lewis first met his dearest friend, Ronald Tolkien, whom he calls Tollers, on May 11, twenty-five years ago and—”

George holds up his hand. “Tollers as in J. R. R. Tolkien?”

“Yes. I am sure . . . yes.”

“Megs! That is the author who wrote The Hobbit.”

“Oh, well, yes, that makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature.”

“Wow. Can you imagine what their conversations are like?”

“I can,” Megs said. “I can.”

George stops his sister with a little pull of her hair and a smile.

“So,” she says with a smirk. “Once upon a wardrobe, not so long ago.”

“And not so far way,” he says as if their voices are combining.

*

The River Cherwell rushed by as evening turned to night and the water found its way to the Thames. As Jack and two other men walked along a path behind Magdalen College, Jack’s walking stick swung with the rhythm he always used: tap swing, tap tap swing. Autumn had turned the leaves of the beech trees crimson and gold. Fallen ones crackled beneath their shoes; others stubbornly clung to almost bare branches.

Jack ambled with Tollers and a lecturer at Reading named Hugo Dyson. The men’s heads were bent toward each other in conversation, stopping now and again when a point must be made.

The mile-long pathway called Addison’s Walk was accessible only by an arched stone bridge over the Cherwell. They trod around a small island, the dirt path lined on either side by grass. The regal trees, their roots exposed and grounded both, looked as if they might begin to step across the river and into a nearby field of purple flowers.

Jack walked so quickly that, although they were in deep conversation, the other two had trouble keeping up. Then Jack stopped abruptly. He pointed at a bush, and the other two men looked. “Well, by Jove,” Jack said, his booming voice echoing among the trees. “I was wondering where I left that!”

There, on a flat, low shrub of hornbeam next to a silver birch, rested a brown angler’s hat made of coarse wove wool, its brim holding a puddle of water that reflected twilight’s pink hues. He lifted the hat and shook it, bounced it twice against his trousers, then placed that hat, damp and limp, on his head and kept talking.